Tatiana Marcus, 13, of Manhasset, N.Y., says the Newtown shootings scared her. "This is starting to feel like a very violent country," she says. / Ed Betz for USA TODAY

by Marco della Cava, USA TODAY

by Marco della Cava, USA TODAY

On a hot Las Vegas night last July 20, 16-year-old Colin Janison was cooling off at a midnight movie when his cellphone suddenly lit up. His eyes left the celluloid scene - Christian Bale wreaking havoc in The Dark Knight Rises - to read a message that seemed to make no sense. At a similar screening 600 miles east in Aurora, Colo., 12 people had just been shot dead and 58 lay wounded.

"It's hard growing up with all this violence that seems to be happening all the time, in public and at school," says Janison, a junior at Palo Verde High School who spent the rest of that fated night with an eye on the exits. "But most people my age, we say it's terrible, we mourn on the day, and we move on. Because we have to. I think it pushes us to be the best we can be, so we can make a difference for the future."

Every generation has its hardships, societal stigmata that mark the child, influence the adult and shape a nation. In the 1950s, students who practiced ducking under desks to cover from the fallout of a Soviet nuclear bomb helped usher in the live-for-today hippie movement. In the late '60s and early '70s, teens facing the constant specter of the Vietnam draft grew into Boomers intent on making the world their financial and cultural oyster.

Although today's young adults have been spared the anxiety produced by the Cold War and conscription, their fears are tied to a parade of events - beginning with 9/11 - whose horror and often sheer randomness have notched new lows on our historical totem pole. To name just a few, they include the ongoing fallout at home of wars in the Middle East, an economic collapse, Hurricane Katrina and, most recently, the shooting in Newtown, Conn. President Obama noted as much in his inaugural address last week, hailing a generation "tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience."

But if those grim markers are the proverbial bad news, this group's mettle is the good. Conversations with kids in the last cohort of the Millennial Generation - also known as Gen Y and born between 1982 and 2000 - reveal a defiant determination that bodes well for the future. They include a Louisiana hunter who frowns on gun control, an African-American in Tennessee who thinks the Obama administration is too liberal on social issues, and a Florida video-game enthusiast who doesn't want a hobby enjoyed by millions blamed for violent acts perpetrated by the few.

Uniting these far-flung citizens are sentiments of sadness, empathy and optimism befitting a socially networked generation that often turns to each other to escape the media barrage that accompanies each calamity. Profoundly affected yet not paralyzed by the events of their times, these 13- to 17-year-olds almost to a person describe a mission to burnish the nation's image to the luster often described by their parents. We as a country can be better, they say. We will be better.

"America is still the greatest country in the world; it's a place that gives you freedom at birth and has so many things to recommend it," says Jack Weinstein, 14, a freshman at The Branson School in Ross, Calif., who recently defended those views when someone wrote a disparaging remark beneath a YouTube video about U.S. armed forces. "This person wrote that we misuse our power, and I said it's unfair to be tagged that way."

That said, the nation's decade-long post-9/11 role in overseas conflicts has affected this generation. With more than 6,000 armed-service casualties and 50,000 wounded over the course of the Iraq and Afghan campaigns, today's teens are bound to know someone directly or indirectly who has suffered a loss. "I have an uncle who was a first responder at the World Trade Center who just died of lung cancer, and a cousin who died in Iraq because of a roadside bomb. We may not be perfect, but we're responding to something that was brought upon us."

Weinstein says he sees the world as "full of terrible challenges," some of which - gun control and health care, for instance - have risen to the fore in the wake of the recent mass killings. But he is convinced his generation will make sense of the madness and craft a new society accordingly.

"The Newtown shooting was devastating, partly because you can't comprehend all those little kids and the full lives they had taken away from them," he says softly. "But our spirit isn't broken. We will come up with our own answers, which we'll speak loudly when it comes time to affect change."

In contrast, Nathaniel Lewis, 16, takes a quieter stance. While shaken by the senselessness of the Newtown killings, the Jupiter (Fla.) High School junior says the event "felt far away." He adds that he isn't a news junkie, preferring Netflix to television, and didn't watch endless reports on the incident.

"If I sound detached, maybe that's just a defense against it all, like subconsciously I really don't want to think about all this terrible stuff," says Lewis, an avid gamer who says the faux violence in his games is pure escapism and not a catalyst for brutality. That said, he admits that the attitude of many of his peers concerns him at times.

"Kids today seem angrier, more offensive," he says. "Maybe it's the constant violence in the news, or just TV shows portraying so many people with attitudes. Making fun of people is made to seem cool, and that bothers me."

But Lewis predicts his generation will wind up just fine. "There's a push to excel, so I assume we'll be successful in life," he says.

That statement begs a question: Just what will America look like when these young Millennials come of age?

This demographic group indeed possesses some of the unfettered optimism of older Millennials who helped elect President Obama in 2008. But influenced as they are by the decade's more dour events - notably the recession - they'll actually approach change far more cautiously, says Michael Hais, co-author with Morley Winograd of Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation Is Remaking America.

"They will be the conformist generation, with an optimistic group attitude that's tempered by the social and economic events of their youth," says Hais. "I was of the 'duck and cover' crowd in the '50s, and in a sense every generation finds their bogeymen, finds the fears they need to react to. There's no saying which generation had it worse, because for each, those particular fears are very real."

Hais adds that today's teens will also be influenced by the next generation, so-called Plurals, kids born after the millennium who will be the first adults in a pluralist nation without an overwhelming racial majority for the first time in history.

"That group will live in an ethnically diverse country driven by women (in the workplace), so the last of those Millennials that you're talking about will have to deal with those new issues as well," he says.

If there's one thing that's a given, today's teens enjoy grappling with all manner of issues via social media. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, Joy Osofsky, professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Louisiana State University, immediately volunteered, as she has during other disasters, to help counsel children.

"When I went to visit a group of kids who had been moved (temporarily) to another state, I expected them to talk about how horrible their experiences had been when instead all they talked about was how much they missed being in touch with their friends," says Osofsky. "The teen identity is all about peers. When these kids were isolated, they used social media to connect to share their feelings."

For teens today, sharing emotions such as fear, sadness and anger is only a text or wall-posting away. To a person, those interviewed say social media helped them process some of the recent difficult events and made them realize they weren't alone in their confusion. But technology also means that exposure to these events never slows. Says Las Vegas' Janison: "Information is coming at us from everywhere, and when it's sad, it's hard to get away."

Social media is "a double-edged sword," says Russell Jones, a Virginia Tech psychology professor who was present on the day in 2007 when 23-year-old student Seung-Hui Cho gunned down 32 classmates and professors. (Cho, like Aurora gunman James Holmes, had been diagnosed with mental health issues before going on his shooting rampage.) "It can help with the impact of trauma. But when children and adolescents are continually exposed to a tragic event, they can be traumatized."

As with many of her peers, Ashton Lane, 17, was devastated by the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut just before Christmas, when 20 children, mostly ages 6 and 7, and six adults were killed by gunman Adam Lanza. She immediately went on Facebook and Twitter to share her feelings with friends; she grew concerned when her own school, Parkview Baptist in Baton Rouge, began considering new safety measures; and she became alarmed when social media erupted with false rumors of a gunman at a local mall.

But shootings in public places are far from the only thing that concerns this avid hunter, who counts two bucks and an alligator among her spoils. She feels that tighter gun-control laws "aren't the solution and just makes me feel we can't defend ourselves." Lane feels her own future is largely secure - she plans to attend college and then work at her father's car dealership - but is nervous for others.

"My boyfriend wants to go into health care, but he's afraid that because of Obamacare (the president's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010), he won't make the money that his hard work deserves," she says. "Other friends want to go into nursing and education, but I'm not sure how that will work out, either."

Lane's conservative views reflect a decade of "lack of security, whether that's at movie theaters or with your parents' jobs," says John Della Volpe, director of polling at Harvard University's Institute of Politics. "The result is a more modest set of goals."

He says a recent poll of Americans ages 16 to 80 about the meaning of the flag revealed that "despite different points of view, there still is a desire for this country to be about hard work and opportunity. Among teens, there's almost a return to the values of their grandparents' generation. They want a job with benefits, they're connected with friends and family, they're appreciative of the small things, and they pay it forward."

Della Volpe tells the story of a meeting he had a year ago with kids on the verge of dropping out of high school. When he asked the group whether they'd done any community service, one boy with a shaved head raised his hand.

"He said he really hadn't done anything like that," Della Volpe says, "but the reason his hair was gone was that he routinely grew it out to donate it to Locks of Love," which provides hairpieces to children with terminal illnesses. "The kid said it like it was no big deal. But that's fairly typical of this generation."

Della Volpe says that the lessons learned by this generation in the wake of many tragedies is the importance of "taking care of our own and each other, which you find in political views that put domestic priorities over foreign affairs. You don't hear that much complaining from this group. They're optimistic and entrepreneurial and feel that they'll get through tough times together."

Altruism as a way of life resonates with Ayanna Martin, 15, a sophomore at all-girl St. Mary's Episcopal School in Memphis. Only after prompting does she go into detail about Build a Wall, the local monthly television program she helps her godmother produce. The show brings together teen girls and their mothers to discuss abstinence and other matters.

"Whenever I hear these girls' stories, my heart is pricked," says Martin. "I just think, 'What can I do to help someone else?' If they feel hopeless coming into the studio, then maybe by talking about their feelings they can feel hopeful going out."

As far as the laundry list of emotionally scarring events she has witnessed in her lifetime, Martin is conflicted. On the one hand, she pushes through the sadness - particularly in the wake of Newtown's elementary school victims, which "brought me to tears" - and focuses herself on "the light at the end of the tunnel" that her deep faith provides.

On the other hand, "when you have Columbine then Aurora then Newtown, you can't help but have a sad reaction. I don't feel hopelessness, but I also know this isn't the last catastrophe we will all have to face."

If Martin has a dream, it's that a decade down the line the nation "once again rests on its true foundation," which she describes as being anchored to a socially conservative, faith-based and limited government that makes the handling of firearms the responsibility of gun owners.

Tatiana Marcus, 13, doesn't share those political views, but like Martin she does have a gut feeling that things need to change. "It feels like a tragedy of some kind is always going on," says Marcus, an eighth-grader at Manhasset Middle School on Long Island, N.Y.

Marcus knows students who attend Newtown's high school and says the shootings there shocked her into realizing that seemingly far-away nightmares could visit her neighborhood. She feels that gun laws need to be strengthened to protect the innocent.

"This is starting to feel like a very violent country," says Marcus, who spends each summer in her mother's native Venezuela, a place not known for its social stability. "The crime rate might be high (in Caracas), but I feel safer going to a mall there than here."

Among her fears is a simple but haunting one: that one day she'll be a mother of children who aren't simply afraid to go to the mall, "but that they'll grow up afraid of people they don't know."

When a tragedy is keenly felt - as Marcus did Newtown - the human response "is a feeling of anxiety and vulnerability," says Virginia Tech's Jones. "This young generation of kids certainly is having their sense of safety and security challenged by all these events, but there's some good news with regard to them coping with it all," says Jones, which includes the fact that most teens live at home, where parents can help provide context and reassurance.

Jones offers one more upbeat note - the boom in the number of students telling him they're pursuing degrees in psychology and psychiatry. "The school responded across all dimensions after those shootings here, and I'm thrilled that the number of applicants looking into my field has shot up in the past five years," he says. "Some good things may come out of the darkness."

Jack Weinstein is sure they will. "Kids want to see the good in life, to see that it's a wonderful thing," he says. "You become stronger through the tough things you endure."